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Steve Jobs has been a lot more active lately in responding to emails sent to his [email protected] address. While many are simple 'yes' or 'no' answers to questions and some seem to have been written by marketing executives or other underlings, occasionally Steve gets into it, with longer messages that show his typical sharp style. Friday night's interchange with Valleywag blogger Ryan Tate is definitely an example of the latter kind.

Tate wrote that he got "ticked off" after watching an Apple commercial that called the iPad a "revolution." While drinking a cocktail, Tate shot off a short email to the Apple founder and CEO, asking if he thought if Bob Dylan at age 20 would have thought the iPad had anything to do with revolution. He probably expected nothing would come of it; in fact, as he writes, "I didn't plan to pick a fight with Steve Jobs last night. It just sort of happened."

Well, here's what happened: Steve Jobs fired back a response, saying that the iPad was about "freedom:" freedom from programs that "steal private data" and drain batteries… and yes, from porn. Tate replied that his MacBook battery did fine with Flash, and accused Jobs of irrationally being against Flash, calling custom-built Cocoa (which he kept referring to as "Coca") media "weak content in an approved wrapper," and noted that he thought "porn was just fine." Jobs parried with a remark about how Tate sounded "bitter," and asserted that Apple was just trying to do right by its users, saying that 200,000 apps indicated that "something must be going alright." Tate responded with a complaint about the lack of intermediate APIs and "Apple's pet police literally kicking in my co-worker's doors," in a clear reference to the raid on Jason Chen's apartment. Valleywag and Gizmodo are both Gawker Media sites.

Anyway, you can follow the whole dialogue in Tate's post. Steve Jobs gets credit for directly engaging critics, for sure… even doing so past 2am on a weekend night. And his parting shot was pretty pithy: "Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?" Hey, Steve, tell us how you really feel.